Morphosyntactic Dependencies and Verb Movement in Cypriot Greek

Abstract

This dissertation adopts a unied approach to morphology and syntax and explores the,conditions that trigger or allow variation in morphology and syntax to appear. Based on,data from Cypriot Greek, an understudied variety of Standard Modern Greek, I provide,an analysis of the verbal morphology and the syntax of the verb to show that variation,in grammar is subject to particular morphological and syntactic conditioning.,The current work is divided in two main parts that serve both empirical and theoretical,goals: the rst part provides the description and analysis of the verbal morphology in,Cypriot Greek and compares this with existing analyses from its closest relative, Standard,Modern Greek. With a focus on conditions that trigger allomorphy, I discuss their,appearance for the case of Cypriot Greek allomorphy in the verb.,The second part escapes the word-internal discussion to explore the relevance of the,syntactic environment in the conditioning of allomorphy. With relevance to Germanic,varieties, I propose that the verb moves to the lower C and that Cypriot Greek employs a,CP-recursion structure in embedded environments (Vikner 1994). Head movement of the,verb is conditioned by a strong feature on C, which is found only in some environments.,I argue that the position of the verb plays a role in the appearance of special morphology,conrming the hypothesis that certain syntactic congurations allow particular morphology,to be realized and indicating the interaction of the syntax-morphology interface.,This work provides a novel empirical contribution by documenting phenomena previously,unexplored in the grammar of the understudied variety of Cypriot Greek and by using,theoretical tools in the framework of Distributed Morphology that allow us to capture,morphological variation.